Category Archives: Nintendo

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation

Megaton!

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The announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be a DS game, despite the size of its new host platform, could end up being one of the biggest news stories of recent years. It represents a huge shift in development trends right up there with the mass exodus of Nintendo’s oppressed minions to Sony circa 1995.

The movement of Dragon Quest back to Nintendo – for this instalment, at least – comes over a decade since the last ‘proper’ Nintendo Dragon Quest and may not have the impact of Final Fantasy in the West, but in Japan this is, infamously, the game that cannot legally be released on a school day because of the effect it has on productivity. It’s second only to Final Fantasy and, when coupled with the insane popularity of the DS in Japan, has the potential to smash sales records. I was in Japan when the FFIII DS remake came out and the only units I saw on sale were expensive import models from Europe. This should be even bigger.

More than anything this is a slap in the face to Sony. One of their bigs guns has gone portable, and it’s not on theirs. This is going to put even more distance between the DS and PSP, in fact. And if this is as big of a success as it should be I’d bet money that Dragon Quest X turns up on DS or Wii. Low development costs and colossal sales are an irresistible combination for any company, and I’m sure they’re quite aware of how much a game on the scale of DQVIII would cost to develop on the PS3.

I’ve seen the complaints the people expecting this to be a PS3 game and can understand them (although I think the DQIX screenshots look great), but Square Enix won’t be able to hear them. They’re too busy filling up a swimming pool with money.

Games, Impressions, Nintendo

Having a Wii

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My Wii

That’s the last pun, I promise.

New console aside, I haven’t felt this excited about a new game (Zelda, in this case) since Ocarina of Time back in 1998. As much as I love my other consoles nothing gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling more than a new game from Nintendo when they’re on flying form. I think it’s that je ne sais quoi that the GameCube lacked and the DS restored for me.

But alas, although I have my Wii that’ll have to wait for now. Zelda and Trauma Center are in a separate order and left earlier, so they should arrive imminently, but the delay has given me some time to fiddle with the console and included software, which is nice. Every cloud, as they say…

While both the 360 and PS3 try to out-monolith each other, Nintendo deserves credit for making what is really the only one of the three next-gen consoles to have a lot of aesthetic appeal. They know it, as well, packing in a stand to sit it vertically rather than taking the obvious opportunity to leave it out and charge a tenner for it. Add in the nice luminous slot-loading drive – the first one I’ve seen that can handle 8cm discs – and the minimalist fa?ade which beautifully complements the DS Lite and, for the first time in a while, you have a Nintendo who are trying to make their kit look cool and desirable. No Fisher Price jokes this time. Continue reading Having a Wii →

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Whatever Happened to Plug and Play?

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Remember when a new console had to be connected to power, connected to the TV, and that was it? Those were the days…

With all of the big three espousing network connectivity and, to wildly differing extents, higher resolutions, will those days ever come back? Getting the full experience from a games console is no longer a case of picking up a SCART cable along with the new hardware. As well as needing an expensive TV, just setting it up relies on an intimate knowledge of your TV’s supported inputs and resolutions as well as the favoured sound formats of your audio setup. I’m a technical masochist and so actually like fiddling with settings, but I doubt the average person does. We all must have cringed at friends with nice widescreen TVs but with their DVD player set to 4:3.

Networking is just as bad, requiring either a wired network within range of the console or a headfirst dive into the world of wireless networking – encryption protocols, DHCP servers, MAC filters, SSIDs, keys, and other such fun – to get what can be the main thrust of the hardware in the case of the 360.

And then there was firmware. The risk of completely killing your hardware aside, it’s more than slightly annoying to find yourself unable to play a PSP game because it has a mandatory firmware upgrade on the disc and your machine doesn’t have enough battery power to let you flash it. So much for ease of use there. Since its release the PS3 has had two firmware updates weighing in at nearly 100MB each, which is no quick and painless download on a 2Mb connection with a bandwidth limit. I’m sure you’re familiar with the stories of firmware updates killing 360s and Wiis, as well. Don’t even get me started on game patching and modern developers’ inability to notice players randomly disconnecting from online games.

Necessary evils though these may be if we want these new experiences, surely someone out there can come up with some kind of standards. Why not make TVs that can tell your devices what resolution they want? Why not test your bloody games before you ask us to pay for them?

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

More Hours in the Day, Please

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One of my favourite arguments for why emulation is usually a bad thing is that, when you have a few gigs of SNES games, you don’t appreciate them and never get to give them your full attention. I can’t say I enjoyed spending £60-70 per game, but at least I’d play the hell out of them and enjoy them all.

What I’m discovering now that I can afford to buy more than a handful of games each year is that I’m having the same problem. I mentioned back in October how hard it was going to be to buy everything I wanted and, having bought a good chunk of them (seven, according to a quick count), I’m now finding that it’s just as hard to do them all justice.

Okami sits abandoned at the 20-hour mark, I rushed my way through Call of Duty 3, I’ve barely scratched the surface of F.E.A.R., fifteen songs through Guitar Hero II, maybe a couple of hours into GTA: Vice City Stories, ran through Splinter Cell once (unusual, given my track record with the series), and I’m lagging behind the rest of my friends list on Gears of War. Thank God I don’t have to juggle the PS3 and Wii at the same time. Anyone else having trouble with too much of a good thing?

I guess I’ll have a nice backlog to work on in the slow summer months, but then I’ll be too busy complaining that there are no new releases to play any of this old stuff.

Just chalk this up as another reason to stagger releases throughout the year.

Games, Nintendo

The Zelda Conundrum

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The reviews of Zelda: Twilight Princess are coming in and it looks like a certain contender for game of the year. Naturally, being a Zelda fan (who isn’t?), I’m desperate to play it. Therein lies a problem.

  • I want it now.
  • I want it in widescreen and 480p. Strictly speaking I want it in 720p, but I’ll take what I can get.

So get the Wii version, right? Well…

  • I don’t want to look like a twat while I’m playing it. That may sound shallow, but my reservations over the controls go into the functionality as well: I want to be able scratch my nose without clattering the poor maiden who I’m trying to save with my sword, for example. In short: I want to play it with a controller. The ports are there so why not give me the option to use them?
  • Twilight Princess is the only Wii game that I want for the forseeable future. I’m reluctant to buy a whole new system for this game when there’s a perfectly functional, albeit slightly crippled, one on a system that’s been gathering dust since, well, the last Zelda. Doesn’t my faithful Cube deserve its last hurrah?

What’s a guy to do? It’s tempting just to get pissed off with Nintendo for doing this, since ultimately if they’d put widescreen and 480p into the GameCube version I wouldn’t have any issues here. The Cube can certainly handle it in 480p (the game runs on the Wind Waker engine, and that was progressive four years ago) so it’s clearly a deliberate decision to annoy the gamers with a side job in geekery. And get them to buy a Wii, of course. The console that’s designed to draw in non-gamers…

Gah!